


Sea in Storm

by Project0506



Series: The Making of A Man [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23766289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: "There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man"Rex's biggest vice has always been rage.Part 3 of Making of a Man, in which Torrent finds out about Anakin's past.
Relationships: CT-6116 | Kix & CT-7567 | Rex, CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker
Series: The Making of A Man [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1695628
Comments: 108
Kudos: 809





	1. The Minor Fall

**Author's Note:**

> I would like to DEEPLY apologize to every single one of you for the cluster earlier today. My eyes got tired of looking at this and straight up rage posted the first chapter this afternoon, without literally any of the editing and quality checks I try to make sure everything goes through. I took it down but I know a couple of you had read and kudo'ed. I love all of your faces so very much, thank you for liking it even when it was still clunky and needed sanding! Thank you kindly loves!
> 
> So while we're all sobbing, hows about we check out [Echo of @dragneel-twins's](https://dragneel-twins.tumblr.com/) gorgeous [ART 100% guaranteed to reduce pain.](https://dragneel-twins.tumblr.com/post/616126869462482944/sea-in-storm-by-thefoundationproject-im)

These training droids weren’t meant to be faced unarmed.

There’s a dizzying collection of training droids optimized for an equally dizzying array of combat specialties. Shipboard combat training is one thing the GAR has never spared expense on. It’s logical: they have packed highly capable soldiers into sometimes horrifically small spaces and hold them there for days, weeks between engagements. They need a way to ensure their soldiers work off the inevitable boredom, any unplanned aggression that breeds its way through the ranks. If the distraction results in more efficiencies on the battlefield, then so much the better.

There are droids built for unarmed combat: slow moving shielded things that take hard hits and hit back just as hard; spritely little things that dodge in and out of guard with little more than a tap. Balanced ones, somewhere in the middle.

Rex twists just enough to catch the downward blow of the droid’s staff in the meat of his bicep instead of the more delicate ball joint in his shoulder. It calculated he would dodge, like it had nearly 85% of the time it’s made that swing. The algorithm is insultingly rudimentary. It’s off balance, has no defense with it’s weapon blocked by Rex’s arm. Rex snaps a loose fist, palm-heel-first, up under the articulated arm it has selected this round as dominant.

Point, Rex.

Pain, sudden and slamming into his hip. Rex’s knee hits the mat.

Point, Ranged Unit 2.

Parameters Met: Droid Team Achieved Point Threshold. Session Failed. Shut Down.

The six droids retreat from the Obstructed Combat Range, return to dock, return weapons, recharge.

Rex punches the mat, grits his teeth, snarls.

These melee droids weren’t meant to be faced unarmed. These ranged droids weren’t meant to be faced unarmored. Rex’s hip throbs, more than the shot he’d taken to the same thigh earlier. This sim round must have found a nerve. Rex punches the mat again. Drops, lays face up. Carefully stretches his leg out straight, slowly brings his knee to his chest.

He has about eight minutes, he’s found, before his creds can override the safety lockout and start the round again, discounting delays on the equipment side. But the first set of droids he’d faced tonight should have just about finished recharging, so eight minutes is a safe bet.

Seven minutes, plus one extra for the system to bitch about parameters. There’s a point threshold specifying a win state set for the droid team. It doesn’t like that there isn’t one set for Rex.

Rex rotates his knee parallel to the floor. There are a couple of muscles that really don’t like that, but he doesn’t find anything debilitating. The worst this would do is slow him down, if he’d let it.

He won’t let it. He hasn’t, so far. He controls that much, at least.

Fuck.

_Fuck_.

Rex throws his arm over his eyes and, presses hard enough that there are bright white starbursts and static under his eyelids. For just a second he blocks out the world. He wishes he could block out his mind as easily.

Fuck.

Time check. Two minutes, five minutes to initial reset. Fuck.

Rex rolls to his feet and starts running.

He hadn’t meant to sleep. He’d known better, had stocked up on stims. But his numbers must have been off, something wore off before he re-upped on something else and he’d closed his eyes to images of his General in a tube, running running running as if they could wear him down enough to beat his personality out of him, fighting in remedial training with that terrified desperation of knowing it’s _the last chance_ -

Small mercies, Rex had woken up first _then_ thrown up everything he’d managed to down that day: bile and caff and artificial-chem stims.

Time check. Three minutes, four minutes to initial reset.

Rex pushes his pace.

He doesn’t know much about the realities of slavery, the connotations, the emotional impact. His subconscious had filled in blanks and he-

Time check. Three minutes, four minutes to initial reset.

Rex kicks off the next corner, scrambles up the half wall and throws himself obstacle to obstacle. His leg tremors on a jump, he stumbles, catches the edge of the wall with chest and elbow and a soft spot under his arm.

His lungs empty on impact and his mind goes blessedly white. He loses grip, drops the four feet and crumples at the base. He tries to hold on to the blank white.

Time check. Five minutes, thirty hours to initial reset.

Fuck.

“I’m just the first wave,” General Skywalker says with a calmness Rex can’t imagine he feels.

They’ve covered the walls in this range to mimic different local surfacing troopers can expect to find. This wall used some sort of tan-colored equivalent to unrendered duracrete. It’s cool and rough under Rex’s forehead. Rex has welts all the way down one arm where he’d caught it in the fall, threatening to bleed.

“Kix is on backup,” Skywalker continues, as if he doesn’t need Rex to hold a conversation. Rex would have known that, if he thought about it. Skywalker can’t lock Rex out of training without filing a reprimand. Kix can. Rex thinks he can nearly make out the shape of him, back in the shadows on the other side of the transparisteel observation wall. “We’re keeping Cody as the orbital bombardment option.”

_Cody_.

If there’s anyone in the sector statistically most likely to put Rex on the mats, rip him out of his head for long blissful minutes, it would be Cody. Rex has never gotten close to matching him in hand to hand.

“Call him.” When was the last time Rex has said anything? His voice is as rough as the wall.

Rex knows Skywalker’s answer before his says it. His face is that particular brand of obstinate.

“No,” he snaps, as predicted.

Reason is very unlikely to work, when he’s in a mood like this. Rex will have to appeal to emotions.

He feels dirty, thinking that.

“No,” General Skywalker cuts him off, before he has a chance to say anything. “Torrent is going to deal with this _in-house_ first,” he says firmly. “If we can’t, _then_ we’ll raise it.”

That’s not practical, Rex thinks. Why not go for the effective solution first?

Skywalker slips out of his robe, folds it neatly and puts it on top of his shoes in a corner. “I’m not going to let us set that precedent now,” he mutters, bitterly. “Where we run straight to alor1 whenever we have difficulties.”

If reason won’t work, aim for the emotions instead.

Rex doesn’t have a name for the blend of feeling that claws through his stomach and bleeds up his spine. Skywalker’s got eyes on his face, sharp and analyzing. Measuring the impact of his words.

Rex really has taught him too well, hasn’t he?

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Rex guesses. Wherever he heard that word, however much of Mando’a he’s absorbed, he wouldn’t know the depth of meaning behind it. He only knows enough to weaponize it.

Skywalker inclines his head, acknowledges the point. “You can explain it to me, if you win.”

Horror. That’s what he feels now. This one he knows. It’s been prominent the past few days.

“I’m not going to fight you.”

“You’ve just spent four hours fighting yourself,” Skywalker shoots back. “Doesn’t look like it helped any. And you’re not getting the droids back. I’m willing to keep extending the lockout.”

“ _I can’t fight you!_ ”

Rex is choked with a helpless, aimless fury willing to scorch anything he touches. Like he is now he _can’t_ he can’t raise a hand to his -

The blow, if landed, would have shattered his nose.

Rex is a well-designed weapon. The block is automatic, the retaliation even more so. Skywalker flows around his fist as though he’d never intended to be where it could land.

“I won’t hurt you,” Rex pleads. He’s pushing to his feet anyway, he’s facing a threat, he’s falling into stance. He’s never once been in control, has he?”

“ _Don’t make me watch you hurt yourself_!” Skywalker rages. “Not over me, not over _something you can’t fix_.”

Rex has millions of little brothers, and he’s never been able to help a single one, he thinks, he knows. Not in any way that mattered. Skywalker is just one more failed. One more failure, long before Rex even understood his brothers needed saving.

( _Why was Cody the only one who had_ _realized?_ _What does that say about Rex?_ )

Rex steps back from the next blow, steps forward into the one after that.

Everyone always, always expects him to dodge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Head, chief, for example of a clan. Back  
> 


	2. The Major Lift

The General’s open-handed style is simply the same as his saber style, adjusted for a lack of weapon and without many of the aerial maneuvers designed to give him stand-off ideal for his weapon’s reach. Each one of those points is a handicap he can’t afford against someone who knows what they’re doing, who revels in close-in combat and breaking through defenses. It isn’t even difficult. Rex gets an ankle to the back of his knee and rams a shoulder to his collarbone and he goes slamming to the mat, a look of shock edging his face.

If he’d been armed, that move would have put his blade through Rex’s ribs. If he’d been armed, or Rex cared to fight cautiously, it’s not an opening that would have been considered. Jedi have the Force but it won’t help if they don’t use it, and Skywalker, as far as Rex can tell, hasn’t.

Rex chases his opening forward.

“ _Hold_ ,” snaps over the loudspeakers and something terrifying in the back of Rex’s mind unclenches. Kix. He’d forgotten. Kix is here with eyes on, and won’t let Rex push too far.

Instead of pressing the attack, Rex backs up out of arms reach while Skywalker pulls himself up.

“ _And so you’re aware Captain I’ve got enough here to put down half of Torrent._ ” And good enough aim to hit Rex from a hundred yards, Rex knows. Relief is heady, but shortlived.

Skywalker scoffs, and it’s a surety edged with arrogance. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” he says as if he knows the answer and is annoyed he has to lead them there. There’s a growing dismay in Rex as he wonders: does he actually not understand?

“ _This is the_ _second_ _time you’ve done this sir,_ ” Kix says, and the tinny speakers don’t do anything to hide his anger. “ _You_ _can’t_ _approach someone who might not have control of themselves._ _For_ _both_ _of your safeties._ ”

“Rex wouldn’t hurt me,” Skywalker says with unearned, unsubstantiated confidence.

Rex has to lean forward, grip his knees. How could he _not know_?

He had nearly no guard in their brief exchange of blows, never even seemed to pull on the Force. There had been no strategy to him. How _easy_ would it have been -

“Rex?”

Rex throws a battlesign halt, one he knows Skywalker understands means he needs a moment. Skywalker will respect that.

“We call it ‘being in crisis’,” Rex says when his voice is nearly steady. Kix had said this was the second time. _Wh_ _at other crisis_ _had Skywalker approached?_ “The subject does not have full command of their faculties. Their reactions become unpredictable.”

“Rex,” he says and he seems confused but not unsure, _it’s not enough_. “You wouldn’t hurt me-”

“I once startled a friend so badly he broke my neck.”

The silence is horrified and complete. The room echoes with it. Skywalker takes a step back, but only the one. It’s not enough. A single step wouldn’t make any appreciable difference on Rex’s ability to close the distance.

“What do you mean?”

The observation room speakers hum on. “ _The first time Jesse and I shared a bed, I woke up disoriented and drew on him,_ ” Kix admits. It’s nothing more than a reporting of fact. “ _A knife, but only because I was smart enough to have moved the blaster out of reach before we went to sleep_.”

Skywalker swallows. His eyes are wide.

“We’re _soldiers_ ,” Rex says. He doesn’t have any other way to explain it. All his life he’s known: this is just something that happens to soldiers sometimes, when they’ve had more than they can handle. Most times they can walk it back before anything happens.

Sometimes they can’t.

“I don’t _want_ to hurt you. I wouldn’t mean to, and you can defend yourself. But there’s always the chance I _could_.” And all it would take is one lucky hit. Rex knows better than to spar when angry. He _does_. Why didn’t he stop it before it started?

Why didn’t Skywalker leave? Rex’s General trusts when he says he needs time to think. Why didn’t he trust when Rex knew he was too angry to fight? Why didn’t he get away?

Rex clenches his teeth, cuts off the tide of thoughts. The overwhelming storm of snippets of thoughts, raging half-completed and all the more sinister for it: that was what brought him to this exact moment in the first place.

“You can’t let me hurt you,” Rex says simply. It would break him.

Rex drops cross-legged to the mat; he’s buzzing too hard to be of any use for anything right now. _What if what if what if_ beats hard through his pulse.

Slowly, still just outside of reach, Skywalker follows suit. “What was I supposed to do then,” he challenges. But. It sounds more like he’s asking for information, rather than just arguing. “Was I supposed to leave you to keep… getting yourself shot?”

“ _No,_ ” Kix drawls over the speaker, and Rex had again forgotten he was there. “ _That is also not a healthy coping mechanism_.” The accusation is unsubtle and deserved. Rex dips his head, takes it.

“I should probably have tried having a conversation,” he admits.

Skywalker giggles and promptly looks guilty at the sound. Rex manages a smile for him.

Kix huffs. “ _Think you still need me in the nest sir_?”

Not just in the observation room, then, Rex realizes, but up on top in the tower. Full 360 view. Kix probably had a tranq with sights lined on Rex this entire time. Kix wouldn’t have allowed him to lose control.

Rex’s General might not have given thought to his own safety, but Rex’s command crew always knew how to cover when Rex couldn’t.

“No,” Rex says thickly. “Come down, Vod.” Thank you, he means.

“ _Understood_ ,” Kix reports, and Rex hears ‘any time’.

Rex’s General shifts. He’s learned something new about boundaries today and it’s left him off kilter again. He’s always more tactile when he’s unsure. Rex allows himself a few long seconds of thought, to make sure he’s present in this moment. He reaches a hand out to his General.

“There’s training,” Rex says, and they sit arm-against-arm. “For commanders and medics, and as part of the ARC training, about how to recognize someone in crisis, how to react.”

He nods. “Yeah I think that’s. Probably something I need to know.” It’s something Rex should have taught him a while ago. That’s on him. Skywalker stirs, jostles Rex’s arm a little. “But you’re also going to show me that throw you did right?”

Sometimes, Rex thinks with a reluctant smile, his General is incredibly predictable.

“We’ll practice,” he allows. “It’s simple. It would be even simpler if you _use the Force_ during hand-to-hand.”

“I'm already predicting your moves,” Skywalker laughs as if just knowing a hit is coming is enough, as if the concept of more is ridiculous.

Occasionally the gaps in his techniques that Skywalker just doesn’t see are incredible. It’s never been more obvious that the Jedi were not primarily a military force. “You could deflect blows. Use it to augment where your guard is weak or when you can’t get a block up in time.”

He considers it. “I don’t know if I can do that fast enough for a fistfight.” He muses. He manages to get all the way through the sentence before remembering he’s talking to the man who once came up with most of the ideas for Murderball. His face reads trepidation. “Rex…”

Rex lets his face fall to calm, nothing given away. “We’ll figure it out.”

They’ve settled back to quiet when Kix strides in, tranq gun slung cross body. He pauses only long enough to deliver a thunderingly judgmental eyebrow to the pair of them, before he slumps himself down on Skywalker’s other side.

“I’d heard something about conversation,” he says, and Rex doesn’t think he’s mistaking the apology in his tone.

“You did.” Rex sighs and the quiet humor that had tried to sprout between them evaporates on the breath.

They both give him time to pick his words.

Rex isn’t going to ask Skywalker to explain anything about his childhood, give any details. He knows nothing his General would say would comfort him. It was over a decade ago and there’s nothing Rex could do. No plans, no tactics. It’s past, and the only thing Rex _can_ do is help his General in the here and now with the things he sometimes struggles with.

No, it’s not the past they need to talk about.

“When I heard,” he starts, “that you had been a slave as a child I started to draw some parallels,” Rex says quietly. “You know what I mean, don’t you? You’ve thought it.”

Reluctantly, Skywalker nods. He’d thought it, but he wouldn’t have said it. Wouldn’t have insulted them with the truth.

Before this, before he’d stopped to _think,_ Rex would have been insulted to hear it. He’d never before had reason to equate his situation, or his brothers, with slavery.

(He can’t stop seeing the General’s face on one of the vod’ikae1 still in tubes. On one of the ones realizing they’re being considered too much work for the investment.)

He wants to explain that, wants to make his General understand what it was that had pushed him from helplessness to rage, had driven him down here with the sole intention of forcing himself not to think.

Kix’s eyes meet his over their General’s shoulder. They’re calm, patient. Understanding. For as long as Kix draws breath, Rex knows he will have his back. He deserves more than excuses.

So Rex doesn’t give them excuses.

That’s not what’s important. Skywalker was a slave too, and Kix is Kix. They’ll understand.

He lets the words curl into the room soft and deep like a threat of distant storm.

“We’re leaving.”

They land like a thunderclap.

Kix makes a noise, a jagged one that sounds like it cuts him on the way out. Skywalker’s hands are a vice around Rex’s forearm. Rex clutches him back.

“You’re going to free them all,” the General breathes, and Rex has to jerk his head no.

“Cody is,” he says. Because Cody was the only one who saw. Both he and Kix must have noticed the edges of Cody moving. It’s still not something Rex is willing to say out loud, even in Torrent spaces.

Skywalker bobs his head, curls harder against Rex’s side. “When,” he asks. His lips don’t move.

“Not yet. There’s still work to do first.”

He swallows. “You’ll make it,” he prays. He’s shaking. “You will.” Rex reaches up to scrape lightly at the curls at the back of his head.

There’s one more important thing.

“We’re taking you.”

It seems like it happens in slow motion. Skywalker _crumples_ and Kix crushes him to Rex’s side. “Vod,” Kix hisses in whisper. “Vod, you’re okay. You’re okay we have you.” We have you, Rex thinks. And we’ll fight to keep you.

There’s hope and longing and disbelief in Kix eyes, even as he tries to focus on their General. It makes even his steady manner stutter.

The grip on Rex’s wrist is just on the edge of grinding the bones together.

“Mind your words,” Rex breaths and pulls them one into each arm. “Mind your thoughts.” It’s something every vod is taught by his brothers, almost before he knows words. It’s a lesson no one wants their brothers to first learn through experience. “But you are Torrent and Torrent is Vode2. And Vode is Kote’s.”

From the day he knew he was allowed, Skywalker has never hesitated to press his forehead against Rex’s, and he doesn’t begin now. He surges forward, desperate and clinging.

“Anakin Skywalker,” Rex pronounces, only sound enough to fill the bare space between them. “Of Torrent of Vode. The Vod’alor recognizes you.”

Anakin of Vode hiccups a sob. “I don’t know what that means,” he says, though he does.

“Family,” Kix says, always Rex’s backup, his witness. He’s pressed his head to Anakin’s shoulder. It only somewhat hides the trembling. “Aliit3. Home.”

“Home,” Rex agrees, curls a hand around Kix’s head, just behind the tattoo, and grips. He pulls both his vode to his chest.

Home. Not yet. But soon.

“Vode An4.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Little Brothers. Back  
> 2\. Brothers. In context, used as the name of their clan. Back  
> 3\. Clan. Back  
> 4\. Brothers All. Back  
> 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Hurts Like Hell](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23821885) by [Fireheart021102](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fireheart021102/pseuds/Fireheart021102)
  * [Without You](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23996704) by [Fireheart021102](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fireheart021102/pseuds/Fireheart021102)




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